C. S. FORESTER – Payment Deferred. Little Brown, hardcover, 1942. Reprinted many times, including Bantam #816, paperback, 1951.

   Payment Deferred is not a mystery. It is, rather, a stunning tour de force detailing “the perfect crime,” and its devastating aftermath on a working-class British family. Everything is in the telling.

   Will Marble and his family exist rather drearily on his income as a clerk at a bank. When a long-lost relative arrives from the colonies (Africa) with a fortune in cash and a sad story about having no other living relatives, Mr. Marble seizes the moment. He murders the boy, buries him in the backyard, and doubles the fortune through a series of crooked financial manipulations. He becomes a man of wealth and station. He has committed the perfect murder and has gone unpunished. All seems right with the world.

   What follows is a tale of retribution visited on Mr. Marble, his wife, and ultimately his children. The family, never close, begins to fall apart. The daughter, embarrassed by her parents’ common background, turns her back on the family (if not their newfound wealth) and leaves home. The son, bought off with expensive gifts and enrollment in the public school system, is both unloved and unloving. Mrs. Marble, discovering her husband’s terrible secret, is forced to share his nightmare world of fear and suspicion. Mr. Marble, forever brooding, sits by an open window refusing to leave home and maintains a constant vigil on the unmarked grave. His drinking, always a problem, gets worse. A blackmailing neighbor bleeds him financially. The family seems farthest apart at those times spent together.

   Forester’s prose is first-rate and his characterizations haunting. And the ending is guaranteed to surprise, with just the right fanciful touch to make it a perfect ironic counterpoint to the somber tone of the rest of the novel.

   C. S. Forester’s fame rests on his later, non-criminous writings, in particular his series of sea adventures featuring Captain Horatio Hornblower, which remain in print to the present. Several films have been made from his novels, among them the 1942 MGM production of Payment Deferred (starring Charles Laughton) and the 1951 Humphrey Bogart/Katharine Hepburn film The African Queen.

   His only other crime novel, Plain Murder, was published as a paperback original by Dell in 1954.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.